There seems to be memories that either run in slow motion, or else they don't run at all. People talk about the terror of a scream, the horror of the raw, spontaneous excursion of fear through the vocal chords. Now maybe I've listened to too much heavy metal music and thus find in a scream a sort of melody and not so much fear. A long, sustained, scream doesn't scare me. It's the cracking in that pitch that does it, it's the vocal desecration of that melody. That's what's scary. Not when a grown man is forced to scream, but when a grown man struggles to scream. When all that can escape between the giant panic breathes and audible sobs of "I'm sorry, I love you, I'm so sorry" is that high pitched panic yelp, akin to a little girl running from the worm in the garden, that noise that knocks on the door of the sound barrier. When a grown man is fighting for air, professing love and apology as if standing at the feet of a wrathful God ready to exact judgement, it's then the voice gets loud and gets volatile and cracks and breaks like a banshee being drowned, like a dog being tortured, like a little girl being raped. That's when a scream is scary. When it stops being a scream; it's terrifying.
In slow motion every action however innocuous takes on renewed significance. The head turns on the pillow, the arm follows, body rolls and then that non - scream hits. With a sudden defiance you open your eyes wide as if commanding the dream to stop, you regain control and in the split second where you peel back your eye lids you say to yourself "Silence! I am awake, I am in control, hush now." In the seconds that proceed lifetimes pass, the pounding in your chest quickens as you realise that the euphoric relief you expected upon the opening of your eyes is trapped underneath the eyelids. Although you would never admit it there's the part of you that still thinks this isn't real, this part of you needs confirmation and relentlessly the eyes that failed to bring you release once already try again to save your mind. It's then that you meet the eye of the girl in your dorm, her bed adjacent to yours and you see from her wide eyes that they too failed to stop the screaming. It's real.
Over the course of the next hour your eyes relinquish control to your ears. Three realities can he heard outside your door. The broken scream writhing on the floor. The drunken brother trying to calm him. The police and fireman trying to keep this grounded in some rational protocol. very so often the three entities blur into glorious chaos as the volume explodes then vanishes and those following logical procedure are forced to abandon it for their own safety.
"Adam stop it!" - "Get off me! It hurts!" - "I know it hurts Adam, I know it hurts," - "Give him the shot!" - "..." - "Just give him the goddamn shot, knock him out!"
Distinguishing the different characters becomes a task of deduction that uses the dialogue spoken as all voices become on in the dense fog of confusion.
And so it plays out like a soap opera about domestic abuse interwoven with grind house sound bites. so ugly you can't stop looking, so harrowing you can't stop listening. Once you open yourself to the scene you need closure. Closure finally comes when all the breathing is of the same volume and at that resting rate of seventy beats per minute. The hardest thing though is that you never really left that dream state. It's still dark with only the vague flicker of street light pushing against the window and ultimately you were never really awake, almost as if that wide eyed pop earlier failed to you to consciousness at all.
So the rest of the night you're rolling it round in your head. Stuck in Neverland (that places between asleep and awake) persistently reliving the hour in various speeds of slow motion.
No comments:
Post a Comment